Migraine & Headache Disorders and Cannabis

Considering treating your migraine or headache disorder with medical cannabis? It’s a complicated topic with a variety of perspectives, so I’ve tried to distill some of the most important information below. I hope it’s a helpful guide.

Marijuana’s Efficacy for Migraine or Headache Disorders

Because laws make research of medical marijuana very difficult, there have been no blinded studies on its use for migraine or headache disorders. Anything you learn about it for migraine or headache is based on anecdote (or extrapolated from a small amount of research on rats). I’ve asked multiple headache specialists for opinions and have been told repeatedly that patients are pretty much evenly split between those who get relief and those who feel worse after using it. My discussions with patients are along those same lines. Its strongest track record is with treating nausea, which can be as debilitating as the pain for some of us.

Efficacy of Different Strains

There are hundreds (may be even thousands) of different cannabis strains, all cultivated to have different effects and address different symptoms. If the marijuana that your brother’s friend’s cousin got for you didn’t help (or made you feel worse), a different strain may still be effective. You can look up many of the strains on the internet by condition or symptom that they treat, including migraine, nausea, anxiety and insomnia. Leafly.com displays the most commonly reported adverse effects of each strain. Not all of these strains will be available at your local dispensary, but dispensary employees can give you recommendations for which might be most useful for you.

Rebound Headache Risk

A couple headache specialists have told me that they don’t know for sure, but believe that marijuana has a similar risk for rebound (medication overuse) headaches as opioids do. It’s best to follow the same rules for opioids (no more than 10 a month) and use as little as possible each time.

How Much to Use

There are no set guidelines for how much to use, though starting with a very small amount is probably wise. Watch your symptoms carefully to see if you feel better, worse or about the same, then decide if you want to try more. If you smoke (or eat) too much, there’s a chance you’re not actually treating the migraine or headache, but getting so stoned that you don’t notice it very much. That may be what you’re going for, but remember that the more you use could increase your risk of rebound headaches.

Smoking/Vaporizing vs. Eating

The two main ways to use medical cannabis are to smoke it or to eat it. The differences are akin to those of oral triptans vs. injected triptans.

Smoking gets the cannabis into your system the fastest and you can quickly see if you need more. Smoking anything can be harmful, although a recent large-scale study found cannabis to cause less lung damage than tobacco. (Using a vaporizer has similar advantages to smoking, but is thought to be less potentially damaging to the lungs. Vaporizers are expensive, so you may not want to invest in one until you discover if marijuana is even helpful for you.)

If you eat marijuana, it will take longer to take effect and your digestive tract may not process a second dose in time for it to be effective. Gastric stasis (delayed emptying of the stomach, which is a migraine symptom) could also mean that you don’t absorb as much as you need when you need it. And, of course, if you vomit during your migraines, you may not absorb much at all.

A friend who was using Marinol (prescription THC capsules) for chemo-induced nausea told me its effects were highly variable. Sometimes it did nothing, other times it helped tremendously. It depended on how how long it had been since she’d last eaten and how effectively her digestive tract processed the drug that day.

Depression and Cannabis

Although depression is one of the many conditions that cannabis is purported to treat, some research indicates that people who use marijuana are more likely to be depressed than those who don’t. However, this could be coincidence rather than causation. As the Mayo Clinic says, “Marijuana use and depression accompany each other more often than you might expect by chance, but there’s no clear evidence that marijuana directly causes depression.”

Legality

Different states have different laws and restrictions governing the use of medical cannabis. Even if it is legal in your state, the regulations may make it undesirable. (In Arizona, for example, employers can check a database of all registered medical marijuana users… if you’re not OK with your employer knowing that, you probably don’t want to get registered.) In your research, check both official statutes and news articles. The official statutes provide the legal framework, while the news stories tell you how the law is being implemented. Whatever the laws, it’s better to investigate exactly what issues you might encounter rather than stumbling into a mess.

I can’t remember if I already contacted you, but I got migraines, fibromyalgia, etc. from this airborne infection. And I wonder if cannabis helps because the terpenes and fatty acids fight this type of pathogen.

This common yet strangely overlooked airborne pathogen that has infected most people can cause malignancies, schizophrenia, etc., and the infection is apparently almost never diagnosed/correctly diagnosed by doctors, partly due to misinformation. Some online documents state this cancer-causing, mental illness-inducing common airborne pathogen that can cause so many idiopathic (unknown cause) diseases/conditions/symptoms is not zoonotic. That’s wrong! It’s carried by bats and shed in their feces. Bats evolved to deal with the photophobia and tinnitus it causes by hunting at night by echolocation.

My coworkers and I, all immunocompetent, got Disseminated Histoplasmosis from roosting bats (Mexican Free-tail in our case) that shed the fungus in their feces. The doctors said we couldn’t possibly have it, since we all had intact immune systems. The doctors were wrong. And we did not develop immunity over time. We’d get better and then progressively worse periodically and concurrently with similar various symptoms.

More than 100 outbreaks have occurred in the U.S. since 1938, and those are just the ones that were figured out, since people go to different doctors. One outbreak was over 100,000 victims in Indianapolis. 80-90+% of people in some areas have been infected, and it can lay dormant for up to 40 years in the lungs and/or adrenals.

It’s known to cause hematological malignancies, and some doctors claim their leukemia patients go into remission when given antifungal. My friend in another state who died from lupus lived across the street from a bat colony. An acquaintance with alopecia universalis and whose mother had degenerative brain disorder has bat houses on their property.

Researchers claim the subacute type is more common than believed and that many children in California have the subacute form. It’s known to at least “mimic” autoimmune diseases and cancer and known to give false-positives in PET scans. But no one diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or cancer is screened for it. In fact, at least one NIH paper states explicitly that all patients diagnosed with sarcoidosis be tested for it, but to my knowledge most, if not all, are not. Other doctors are claiming sarcoidosis IS disseminated histoplasmosis.

Many diseases it might cause are comorbid with other diseases it might cause, for example depression/anxiety/MS linked to Crohn’s. (It’s known to “mimic” inflammatory bowel disease.)

I suspect the “side effects” of Haldol (leukopenia and MS symptoms) might not always be side effects but just more symptoms of Disseminated Histoplasmosis, since it causes leukopenia and MS symptoms. What about tinnitus, photophobia, psychosis “caused” by Cipro? Hypersexuality and leukemia “caused” by Abilify? Humira linked to lymphoma, leukemia and melanoma in children?

What if this infection that made us so ill isn’t rare in immunocompetent people? What if just the diagnosis is rare, since most doctors ignore it? I mean, we couldn’t possibly have been the only people in the world suffering from Disseminated Histoplasmosis undiagnosed/misdiagnosed by doctors.

Older documents state people who spend time around bats/in caves are known to get Disseminated Histoplasmosis, but the info appears to have been lost, for the most part. And now it’s illegal in England to block a bat’s access to their roost, resulting in things like bat feces falling into wine as it’s being blessed in churches. People buy bat houses for their properties at Lowe’s and Home Depot (because bats and honeybees, unlike humans, are assured a home by the government. But I digress…), people wander through caves for fun, and bat conservationists encourage people to leave bats in buildings/homes. What a terrible mistake those “experts” have made.

The fungus is an Onygenale?/Oxygenale?…whatever…and don’t they consume collagen/keratin? It’s known to cause connective tissue diseases (like scleroderma and/or myxomatous degeneration?), rheumatological conditions, seizures, and mental illness. Fungal hyphae carry an electrical charge and align under a current. It causes RNA/DNA damage. It’s known to cause delusions, wild mood swings (pseudobulbar affect?), and hallucinations. It’s most potent in female lactating bats, because the fungus likes sugar (lactose) and nitrogen (amino acids, protein, neurotransmitters?), releasing lactase and proteinases to obtain them. What about female lactating humans…postpartum psychosis? (And don’t some of those poor women also have trouble swallowing?) The bats give birth late spring/summer, and I noticed suicide rates spike in late spring/early summer. It’s known to cause retinal detachment, and retinal detachments are known to peak around June-July/in hot weather. A map of mental distress and some diseases appear to almost perfectly overlay a map of Histoplasmosis. Cancer is known to occur more often near rivers than in mountains or deserts, just like this infection. Johns Hopkins linked autism to an immune response in the womb. Alzheimer’s was linked to hypoglycemia, which can be caused by chronic CNS histoplasmosis.

The bats eat moths, which are attracted to blue and white city lights that simulate the moon the moths use to navigate. Bats feed up to 500 feet in the air and six miles away in any direction from their roost, but not when it’s raining or when the temperature is less than approximately 56° F. The fungus can grow in bird/chicken feces, but birds don’t carry it because their body temperature is too high, killing the fungus.

From my experience, I learned that no doctor, at least in DFW, will suspect subacute and/or progressive disseminated histoplasmosis in immunocompetent people. Some doctors, at least the ones I went to, will actually refuse to test for it, even when told someone and their coworkers have all the symptoms and spend a lot of time in a building with bats in the ceiling. Victims will be accused of hypochondriasis. (My doctors told me only farmers or AIDS patients get it, it’s only in bird feces, and it always infects the lungs…wrong, wrong, and wrong!) In fact, the first doctor to diagnose me was a pulmonologist, and the only reason he examined me was to try to prove that I didn’t have it, when I really did. No doctor I went to realized bats carry the fungus. And NO doctor I went to in DFW, even infectious disease “experts,” understand the DISSEMINATED form, just the pulmonary form, and the only test that will be done by many doctors before they diagnose people as NOT having it is an X-ray, even though at least 40-70% of victims will have no sign of it on a lung X-ray. It often gives false-negatives in lab tests (some people are correctly diagnosed only during an autopsy, if then, after obtaining negative test results) and cultures may not show growth until after 6-12 weeks of incubation (but some labs report results after only a couple of weeks).

One disease of unknown cause that could be caused by Disseminated Histoplasmosis: I suspect, based on my and my coworker’s symptoms (during our “rare” infectious disease outbreak) and my research, that interstitial cystitis and its comorbid conditions can be caused by disseminated histoplasmosis, which causes inflammation throughout the body, causes “autoimmune” symptoms, and is not as rare as believed. I read that “interstitial cystitis (IC) is a chronic inflammatory condition of the submucosal and muscular layers of the bladder, and the cause is currently unknown. Some people with IC have been diagnosed with other conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, and Sjogren’s syndrome, which raises the possibility that interstitial cystitis may be caused by mechanisms that cause these other conditions. In addition, men with IC are frequently diagnosed as having chronic nonbacterial prostatitis (it likes zinc, and doesn’t the prostate have a lot of zinc?), and there is an extensive overlap of symptoms and treatment between the two conditions, leading researchers to posit that the conditions may share the same etiology and pathology.” Does that sound like Disseminated Histoplasmosis to you?

My coworkers and I were always most ill around May, presumably since the Mexican Free-tail bats gave birth in Texas during May (and the fungus was most potent), relapsing late fall/Thanksgiving to December, for some unknown reason (maybe migrating bats from the north?). We had GI problems, liver problems, weird rashes (erythema nodosum, erythema multiforme, erythema marginatum/annulare, etc.), plantar fasciitis, etc., and I had swollen lymph nodes, hives, lesions, abdominal aura, and started getting migraines and plantar fasciitis in the building, and I haven’t had them since I left. It gave me temporary fecal incontinence, seizures, dark blood from my intestines, tinnitus, nystagmus, excessive yawning, inability to raise my arms at my shoulders, blurry vision/floaters/flashes of light, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, isolated diastolic hypertension, gallstones, elevated liver enzymes, what felt like burning skin, various aches and pains (some felt like pin pricks and pinches), tingling, tremors, restless genital syndrome, “explosions” like fireworks in my head while sleeping, and temporary blindness. Suddenly I was allergic to Comice pears, my lower lip swelling from the juice (latex fruit allergy or oral allergy syndrome?). I had insomnia (presumably from the fungus acidifying the blood, releasing adrenaline) and parasomnias. It felt like strong bursts of electrical shocks or strong steady electrical currents in my body, which now feel like low electrical currents at times, only at night. I was always worse at night. (Because bats are feeding? Or maybe because fungus follows a circadian rhythm?).

I suddenly had symptoms of several inflammatory/autoimmune diseases, including Fibromyalgia, Sarcoidosis, ALS, MS, Sjogren’s syndrome, etc. that have disappeared since leaving the area and taking nothing but Itraconazole antifungal. No one, including doctors (we all went to different ones), could figure out what was wrong with us, and I was being killed by my doctor, who gave me progressively higher and higher doses of Prednisone (1-2 years after I already had Disseminated Histoplasmosis) after a positive ANA titer, until I miraculously remembered that a visiting man once told my elementary school class that bats CARRY histoplasmosis. There’s a lot more. I wrote a book about my experience with Disseminated Histoplasmosis called “Batsh#t Crazy,” (now you know where that term, “bats in the attic/belfry,” and “going batty” came from) because bats shed the fungus in their feces and it causes delusions and hallucinations, I suspect by the sclerotia fungal mycelia can form emitting hallucinogens (like psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine) along with inflammation in the CNS. (Schizophrenics have 2X of a chemical associated with yeast, part of the fungal life cycle.)

Thank you for your time,

Susan McIntyre

P.S. Doesn’t this infection share all the same symptoms with Gulf War Syndrome?

Hello,

I can’t remember if I already contacted you, but this airborne pathogen gave me elevated liver enzymes and a positive ANA titer. And gallstones. It causes hepatitis and jaundice, so can it ever be the cause of idiopathic hepatitis and/or idiopathic jaundice? Can it cause fatty liver disease/non-alcoholic cirrhosis?

(OT, I noticed humans and chimpanzees are the only animals who can get HepC, and are also the only animals who have no liver uricase…in addition to Dalmatians? Is there a connection, and liver uricase interferes with the Hep C life cycle?)

This common but strangely overlooked infection is never even considered by almost all doctors due to misinformation. Since it causes hematological malignancies and precancerous conditions, can it cause pancreatic cancer? Since it causes cysts, can it cause pancreatic cysts? Since it causes inflammation, can it cause pancreatitis (it can cause hepatitis/hepatosplenomegaly)? It “mimics” inflammatory bowel disease.

Since it “mimics” autoimmune diseases, can it ever cause Type 1 Diabetes, due to the autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta cells? This type of organism and mammals (which it can infect) are from the same clade, so does it cause autoantibodies because it has the same or similar molecules? (I think I read it has the same molecule as the myelin sheath of nerve cells, and it gave me symptoms of MS and ALS.). Can it ever cause Type 2 Diabetes?

Vascular: Since this common yet strangely overlooked airborne pathogen is known to cause connective tissue diseases, TIA, sclerosis, etc. what percentage of your patients have health problems caused by this infection? Can it occur in connective tissue without being in the blood? Did I read correctly it can cause aortic aneurysms and aortic dissection? If it can cause inflammation and stenosis, can it cause Artherosclerosis/Carotid artery stenosis? It’s known to cause pulmonary and intracranial hypertension, so can it cause portal hypertension? It’s known to cause dysplasia, so can it ever cause Fibromuscular dysplasia? Can it cause vasculitis/arteritis, lymphedema, peripheral artery disease, Thromboangiitis obliterans, Aortoiliac occlusive disease, and/or steal syndrome, etc.?

Since this common yet strangely overlooked airborne pathogen can cause arthritis and autoimmune symtpoms, can it ever cause rheumatoid arthritis? Since it can cause osteomyelitis, can it cause chronic recurrent osteomyelitis and/or osteosarcoma, since it can cause cancer? Since it can dissolve bone and cause things like myositis, are there any other diseases you deal with that it can cause? Since it can infect the CNS, can it cause any idiopathic neuromuscular diseases? It’s known to cause sclerosis and gave me symtpoms of MS/ALS.

Some online documents state this cancer-causing, mental illness-inducing common airborne pathogen that can cause so many idiopathic (unknown cause) diseases/conditions/symptoms is not zoonotic. That’s wrong! It’s carried by bats and shed in their feces. Bats evolved to deal with the photophobia and tinnitus it causes by hunting at night by echolocation.

My coworkers and I, all immunocompetent, got Disseminated Histoplasmosis from roosting bats (Mexican Free-tail in our case) that shed the fungus in their feces. The doctors said we couldn’t possibly have it, since we all had intact immune systems. The doctors were wrong. And we did not develop immunity over time. We’d get better and then progressively worse periodically and concurrently with similar various symptoms.

More than 100 outbreaks have occurred in the U.S. since 1938, and those are just the ones that were figured out, since people go to different doctors. One outbreak was over 100,000 victims in Indianapolis. 80-90+% of people in some areas have been infected, and it can lay dormant for up to 40 years in the lungs and/or adrenals.

It’s known to cause hematological malignancies, and some doctors claim their leukemia patients go into remission when given antifungal. My friend in another state who died from lupus lived across the street from a bat colony. An acquaintance with alopecia universalis and whose mother had degenerative brain disorder has bat houses on their property.

Researchers claim the subacute type is more common than believed and that many children in California have the subacute form. It’s known to at least “mimic” autoimmune diseases and cancer and known to give false-positives in PET scans. But no one diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or cancer is screened for it. In fact, at least one NIH paper states explicitly that all patients diagnosed with sarcoidosis be tested for it, but to my knowledge most, if not all, are not. Other doctors are claiming sarcoidosis IS disseminated histoplasmosis.

Many diseases it might cause are comorbid with other diseases it might cause, for example depression/anxiety/MS linked to Crohn’s. (It’s known to “mimic” inflammatory bowel disease.)

I suspect the “side effects” of Haldol (leukopenia and MS symptoms) might not always be side effects but just more symptoms of Disseminated Histoplasmosis, since it causes leukopenia and MS symptoms. What about tinnitus, photophobia, psychosis “caused” by Cipro? Hypersexuality and leukemia “caused” by Abilify? Humira linked to lymphoma, leukemia and melanoma in children?

What if this infection that made us so ill isn’t rare in immunocompetent people? What if just the diagnosis is rare, since most doctors ignore it? I mean, we couldn’t possibly have been the only people in the world suffering from Disseminated Histoplasmosis undiagnosed/misdiagnosed by doctors.

Older documents state people who spend time around bats/in caves are known to get Disseminated Histoplasmosis, but the info appears to have been lost, for the most part. And now it’s illegal in England to block a bat’s access to their roost, resulting in things like bat feces falling into wine as it’s being blessed in churches. People buy bat houses for their properties at Lowe’s and Home Depot (because bats and honeybees, unlike humans, are assured a home by the government. But I digress…), people wander through caves for fun, and bat conservationists encourage people to leave bats in buildings/homes. What a terrible mistake those “experts” have made.

The fungus is an Onygenale?/Oxygenale?…whatever…and don’t they consume collagen/keratin? It’s known to cause connective tissue diseases (like scleroderma and/or myxomatous degeneration?), rheumatological conditions, seizures, and mental illness. Fungal hyphae carry an electrical charge and align under a current. It causes RNA/DNA damage. It’s known to cause delusions, wild mood swings (pseudobulbar affect?), and hallucinations. It’s most potent in female lactating bats, because the fungus likes sugar (lactose) and nitrogen (amino acids, protein, neurotransmitters?), releasing lactase and proteinases to obtain them. What about female lactating humans…postpartum psychosis? (And don’t some of those poor women also have trouble swallowing?) The bats give birth late spring/summer, and I noticed suicide rates spike in late spring/early summer. It’s known to cause retinal detachment, and retinal detachments are known to peak around June-July/in hot weather. A map of mental distress and some diseases appear to almost perfectly overlay a map of Histoplasmosis. Cancer is known to occur more often near rivers than in mountains or deserts, just like this infection. Johns Hopkins linked autism to an immune response in the womb. Alzheimer’s was linked to hypoglycemia, which can be caused by chronic CNS histoplasmosis.

The bats eat moths, which are attracted to blue and white city lights that simulate the moon the moths use to navigate. Bats feed up to 500 feet in the air and six miles away in any direction from their roost, but not when it’s raining or when the temperature is less than approximately 56° F. The fungus can grow in bird/chicken feces, but birds don’t carry it because their body temperature is too high, killing the fungus.

From my experience, I learned that no doctor, at least in DFW, will suspect subacute and/or progressive disseminated histoplasmosis in immunocompetent people. Some doctors, at least the ones I went to, will actually refuse to test for it, even when told someone and their coworkers have all the symptoms and spend a lot of time in a building with bats in the ceiling. Victims will be accused of hypochondriasis. (My doctors told me only farmers or AIDS patients get it, it’s only in bird feces, and it always infects the lungs…wrong, wrong, and wrong!) In fact, the first doctor to diagnose me was a pulmonologist, and the only reason he examined me was to try to prove that I didn’t have it, when I really did. No doctor I went to realized bats carry the fungus. And NO doctor I went to in DFW, even infectious disease “experts,” understand the DISSEMINATED form, just the pulmonary form, and the only test that will be done by many doctors before they diagnose people as NOT having it is an X-ray, even though at least 40-70% of victims will have no sign of it on a lung X-ray. It often gives false-negatives in lab tests (some people are correctly diagnosed only during an autopsy, if then, after obtaining negative test results) and cultures may not show growth until after 6-12 weeks of incubation (but some labs report results after only a couple of weeks).

One disease of unknown cause that could be caused by Disseminated Histoplasmosis: I suspect, based on my and my coworker’s symptoms (during our “rare” infectious disease outbreak) and my research, that interstitial cystitis and its comorbid conditions can be caused by disseminated histoplasmosis, which causes inflammation throughout the body, causes “autoimmune” symptoms, and is not as rare as believed. I read that “interstitial cystitis (IC) is a chronic inflammatory condition of the submucosal and muscular layers of the bladder, and the cause is currently unknown. Some people with IC have been diagnosed with other conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, and Sjogren’s syndrome, which raises the possibility that interstitial cystitis may be caused by mechanisms that cause these other conditions. In addition, men with IC are frequently diagnosed as having chronic nonbacterial prostatitis (it likes zinc, and doesn’t the prostate have a lot of zinc?), and there is an extensive overlap of symptoms and treatment between the two conditions, leading researchers to posit that the conditions may share the same etiology and pathology.” Does that sound like Disseminated Histoplasmosis to you?

My coworkers and I were always most ill around May, presumably since the Mexican Free-tail bats gave birth in Texas during May (and the fungus was most potent), relapsing late fall/Thanksgiving to December, for some unknown reason (maybe migrating bats from the north?). We had GI problems, liver problems, weird rashes (erythema nodosum, erythema multiforme, erythema marginatum/annulare, etc.), plantar fasciitis, etc., and I had swollen lymph nodes, hives, lesions, abdominal aura, and started getting migraines and plantar fasciitis in the building, and I haven’t had them since I left. It gave me temporary fecal incontinence, seizures, dark blood from my intestines, tinnitus, nystagmus, excessive yawning, inability to raise my arms at my shoulders, blurry vision/floaters/flashes of light, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, isolated diastolic hypertension, what felt like burning skin, various aches and pains (some felt like pin pricks and pinches), tingling, tremors, restless genital syndrome, “explosions” like fireworks in my head while sleeping, and temporary blindness. Suddenly I was allergic to Comice pears, my lower lip swelling from the juice (latex fruit allergy or oral allergy syndrome?). I had insomnia (presumably from the fungus acidifying the blood, releasing adrenaline) and parasomnias. It felt like strong bursts of electrical shocks or strong steady electrical currents in my body, which now feel like low electrical currents at times, only at night. I was always worse at night. (Because bats are feeding? Or maybe because fungus follows a circadian rhythm?).

I suddenly had symptoms of several inflammatory/autoimmune diseases, including Fibromyalgia, Sarcoidosis, ALS, MS, Sjogren’s syndrome, etc. that have disappeared since leaving the area and taking nothing but Itraconazole antifungal. No one, including doctors (we all went to different ones), could figure out what was wrong with us, and I was being killed by my doctor, who gave me progressively higher and higher doses of Prednisone (1-2 years after I already had Disseminated Histoplasmosis) after a positive ANA titer, until I miraculously remembered that a visiting man once told my elementary school class that bats CARRY histoplasmosis. There’s a lot more. I wrote a book about my experience with Disseminated Histoplasmosis called “Batsh#t Crazy,” (now you know where that term, “bats in the attic/belfry,” and “going batty” came from) because bats shed the fungus in their feces and it causes delusions and hallucinations, I suspect by the sclerotia fungal mycelia can form emitting hallucinogens (like psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine) along with inflammation in the CNS. (Schizophrenics have 2X of a chemical associated with yeast, part of the fungal life cycle.)

Thank you for your time,

Susan McIntyre

P.S. Doesn’t this infection share all the same symptoms with Gulf War Syndrome?